The context
At midnight on August 15, 1947, India attained its independence from Britain. For many on the subcontinent it proved to be a bittersweet moment, for it resulted in the partition of India and Pakistan.
Pakistan, a nation primarily intended for Muslims, was divided into two parts: West Pakistan, comprised of northern Panjab and the provinces of Sind, Baluchistan, and the Northeast Frontier, and East Pakistan, comprised of East Bengal. East Pakistan would become Bangladesh in 1971. At the time of the partition, many families, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh, voluntarily or involuntarily, left behind the lands of their foreparents, afraid they would be living in a nation unsympathetic to their faith. Some 10 million persons are said to have moved from their ancestral homes in 1947, of whom at least a million are estimated to have died in the violence that ensued. Many Hindus from Sind or East Bengal, for example, were cut off from their family roots, as were Sikhs who had lived for generations in northern Panjab. While many Muslim families also moved, millions of others opted to stay in the new nation-state of India, preferring to keep their businesses and lands.From its inception, Pakistan was engaged in debates as to what it meant to be an “Islamic state.” Its more liberal leadership, including Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had fought for the creation of the state, and Liaquat Ali Khan, its first prime minister, wanted to assure a democratic republic which offered opportunity for all. The more conservative ‘ulama‘, as voiced by Syed Abu’l-ala Maududi, wanted to be sure the country was in every respect run on the principles of the Islamic shari‘a. After the death ofJinnah in 1948 and, especially, after the assassination of Ali Khan, in 1951, considerable turbulence ensued, leading, in 1958, General Ayub Khan to seize control as a military governor.
Since then, the military has assumed political dominance in Pakistan, with the ‘ulamdl and more liberal Muslim intellectuals variously seeking to exercise power.1Fortunately for India, those in power led it to become a rapidly developing democracy. Within two decades of independence and especially in the years when Jawarhalal Nehru was India’s first prime minister (1947-64), the young country had made rapid strides toward an industrialized democracy. States which had remained autonomous under the British were incorporated into the new nation (whether by accession or force). By January 26, 1950, the country had a constitution, thanks to a drafting committee chaired by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, which enfranchised all its citizens, including those once known as “untouchables.” A series of five-year economic plans initiated in the first fifteen years, led to attempts to develop village economies, and increased production of food and industry. Indeed, by 1966, India was the seventh most industrially advanced nation in the world and by 1989, thanks to the so-called Green Revolution, food production had increased several fold.
The legal status of women was elevated significantly through a series of laws: one removing inter-caste barriers to marriage (1949); another giving Hindu women the right to divorce and raising the minimum age for marriage for males to eighteen and females to fifteen (1955); yet another gave female children equal rights as males to inherit property (1956). By 1957 some 40 percent of the 92 million women qualified to vote cast ballots, helping to elect twenty-seven women to the national lower house (Lak Sabha) and 105 women to state assemblies.2
Similarly, the third five-year plan targeted the need for enhancing educational possibilities by increasing the number of schools and teachers available for youngsters. By 1960, as a result, some 50 million Indian students were attending almost half a million schools and the literacy rate had risen to 23.7 percent, though only 12.8 percent of India’s women were literate by that time.3
For the rest of the century, India continued its development on many fronts.
The literacy rate has grown with the creation of more schools. Virtually every village has been electrified and provided with modern communication facilities; the founding of highly competitive national Institutes of Technology has helped create a community of scientists, now among the three largest in the world. The economy, once based on a socialist pattern with many nationalized industries, was opened to foreign investment in 1991, thereby stimulating more competition amongst its business elites.Of course, problems have persisted: a large portion of the population - perhaps more than half a billion - continues to live in relative poverty. Cities cannot keep up with the flow of immigrants, who now live on the sidewalks and in slum pockets. The population explosion, especially among the poor, continues almost unabated. There is jostling for space in crowded cities; a quest for power amongst those once disenfranchised; frustration that prosperity and literacy have not reached many at the lower echelons of society; and corruption and cynical exploitation on the part of some politicians, national and local. India, in short, is a microcosm of the modern world, lunging forward toward still unattained possibilities while selectively trying to retain elements of its storied past.
As for religion, it is alive and very visible in India today. Despite predictions by social scientists that forces of modernization, globalization, secularization, and economic development would consign religion to India’s trash bin, in fact the reverse has been true: not only is religion alive, it has been resurgent in many corners of the subcontinent. In fact, it may be not so much despite these kinds of currents, but because of them that religion is resurgent.
To be sure, many Indians have become “secularized” and are interested in attaining “material” prosperity even while the number of technologically and scientifically trained people on the subcontinent has mushroomed.
Yet scholars and even casual observers have noted that prosperous people are not necessarily irreligious and that scientists are often engaged in the building of temples and the rethinking of religion, especially in the Indian diaspora.Of course, globalization has come to India’s cities bringing satellite television, e-mail, cyber cafes, Internet, and most of the wizardry of global communication. The outcome of this process, on the one hand, obviously, is that some people experience what might be called a global consciousness. But globalization can be measured in different ways: it is accessible to different degrees - more accessible in urban areas and to elites - that is, to the educationally and economically privileged and less accessible in rural areas and to the half billion persons who remain poor in India. Further, a “global consciousness” is appropriated selectively. Some pick and choose those parts of the “global culture” of which they will take advantage. These appropriations may be more external than internal. That suggests, further, that a global mind-set may be internalized by relatively few:just because one uses Colombian coffee, for example, doesn’t mean one thinks Colombian. Not only that, one may be “global” and Indian, global and ethnic at the same time, or “global” in one context and “ethnic” in another. Furthermore, “globalization” has spawned resistance and renewed interest in local and national values. We noted in the last chapter how patterns that might be called “global,” or at least originating outside India, nonetheless, led to a rebirth of Indian self-consciousness, including a resurgence of religion.
Similarly, “modernization” is not the opposite of “tradition” as if “tradition” stood for some monolithic past that was unchanging in contrast to some dynamic “modern era.” In fact, we have noticed how India’s past has been constantly changing. Each new moment obviously reflects its own time and place; yet the “past” is perceived and celebrated selectively.
People tend to reclaim a past, reinterpret it, perceiving it in terms that suit their own moment. This is the nature of “tradition”: people constantly reconstruct it based on their perceptions of what must have been. Hence, in India today, new religious movements are said to be consistent with the Vedic past or with agamic practice. Such claims have the character of myth: the present is read into the past. Such perceptions of the past, often glorified, provide a sense of rootedness and identity. Over a century ago, Nietzsche noted that “modern man” was given to groping in his past for a sense of lineage and roots - that is, for “myth”;4 in a similar way, over a quarter of a century ago, sociologist Robert Bellah commented that modernization was marked by rapid social change, but also by a kind of romanticism that found in language, ethnicity, and religion a sense of continuity and identity.5True, many families have discontinued the details of rites of passage so elaborately described in classical texts. Of course, Vedic fire rituals are done much less commonly than might have been the case in ancient India (but, in fact, there have been attempts to recover and re-enact some of these in recent years). Hence, while religion may have changed, it is by no means dead in India. In fact, religion may be as visible in India today as it ever has been - in pilgrimages and festivals, in renovated temples, in the private puja rooms of affluent families. It is worth attempting to capture something of the flavor of this dynamic religious landscape.